NASA Exoplanet-Hunting CubeSat Delivers "First Light" Images
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With the first images from the spacecraft now in hand, the team behind NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is ready to begin charting the energetic lives of the galaxy’s most common stars to help answer one of humanity’s most profound questions: Which distant worlds beyond our solar system might be habitable?
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NASA Exoplanet-Hunting CubeSat Delivers "First Light" Images By Matthew Williams - March 18, 2026 07:35 PM UTC | Exoplanets NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat is a small space telescope that launched to space on January 11th, 2026. Created by NASA and researchers from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at the University of Arizona, the mission is tasked with monitoring the flares and sunspot activity of low-mass stars (M-type red dwarfs and K-type orange dwarfs). The telescope is equipped with far- and near-ultraviolet instruments to assess the habitability of the space environment around planets orbiting these stars. The telescope is a 6U CubeSat, meaning it consists of six cubical units measuring 10 cm (4 inches) on a side, joined to form a spacecraft 2 units wide and 3 units long. As NASA recently announced, the spacecraft obtained its "first light" images of a distant solar system observed by the SPARCS space telescope on Feb. 6th, 2026. With these images now in hand, the SPARCS team is ready to learn more about the galaxy’s most common stars in the hopes of addressing which worlds beyond the Solar System could be habitable. Specifically, SPARCS will monitor lower-mass stars that are the most common in the Universe. Whereas K-type stars account for 11% to 12% of all main-sequence stars in our galaxy, M-type red dwarfs account for roughly 75%. Being so common, scientists are eager to know if these types of stars can support some of the estimated 50 billion planets orbiting within their parent stars' habitable zones. This is especially true of M-type stars, which are prone to flare activity and emit large amounts of UV radiation. *This pair of images shows stars observed Feb. 6, 2026, by the SPARCS space telescope simultaneously in the near-ultraviolet, left, and far-ultraviolet, right. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU* This activity and other characteristics can have a dramatic effect on planetary atmospheres, so knowing more about the host stars is v...
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